Safe from Harm (9781101619629) (23 page)

“I was a lineman,” I said.

“Oh, then you were only a demigod. Me, I was the quarterback and I was the best my school had had in years. I played serious ball and I was good at every sport I'd tried. I was good-looking and I didn't crap on people. That's all it takes in high school. If I hadn't taken that one bad hit, I'd be selling toothpaste and doing color for ESPN today.”

I gave an embarrassed laugh.

“Bear.” He still had his smile, but he was serious now. “I was that good. Jenny had every right to expect the big bucks.”

Mark focused on his salad. He was eating with gusto.

You know what was weird? It was like Phoebe's death had somehow freed him from Liz's control. Like he had thrown off the pretension and all the kowtowing to Liz, and I was glad he had. It's only that I hated that it taken the death of his child to make him be a man.

What if he could have stood up to Liz earlier? What if he could have said, “Look, she's my daughter and she's sad and mad right now, but we're going to stick with her through this—we're going to see her through to the other side and if you can't get with the program, then go sit down with a therapist and
find out how
”? Maybe Phoebe would have come around. Maybe she and Jo would have made up, and Phoebe would come over, say, once or twice a week instead of five or six times, and . . .

“. . . that I was on top of the mountain and Liz—Liz never made the foothills.”

I started listening again.

Mark lifted his water glass and our glasses were refilled.

“I dated the prettiest girl in school, Jenny DeWitt. Phoebe's mom. And everyone knew we were together. And then Liz, who was
wallpaper
in high school, she was
invisible
, decides she's
in love
with me. This is in high school, like, our junior year. Everybody has their role and there is no budging. Not in high school. Not unless you're starring in a teen flick.

“But it's like Liz didn't know that. Like she didn't know that the quarterback never ends up with the fat girl at the end of the movie.” He shook his head, remembering the audacity of the plain, brainy girl who had aspired to the high school football star. I thought it had taken a lot of guts. “And she would
call
me.” Mark fished an olive out of his drink, poked the sliver of jalapeño out with his little finger, ate the pepper.

“Once—and this still makes me cringe—Liz called and kept me on the phone because I had no clue how to get off the phone, because I was a nice guy. I was. And I finally said, ‘Let me get something to eat,' so I set the phone down and I go in the kitchen and get something and a friend comes to the back door and I go off with him. Not on purpose. I forgot Liz was on the phone. I get home, I don't know, had to be a couple of hours later, and I notice the phone off the hook, and I hear, ‘Mark? Mark?' She had
waited
for me.

“Liz tells that story to show how romantic she is but, Bear, it was
pathetic
. I stopped answering the phone. When I stopped answering the phone, she started coming up to me at school. I'm with my friends and she comes up and she asks me to a cotillion! I don't know how she got invited. The rich kids gave them. The popular kids got invited. I got invited, but I couldn't afford it. Liz wasn't rich or popular, so I don't know how she got an invite. Maybe she did a rich kid's term paper or something. I said I had plans. There was no way I could go with her. But, damn, I could not shake her.”

All the while he's talking, I'm seeing a sixteen-year-old girl, overweight, not pretty, who found the courage to call her high school's brightest sports star. I'm seeing her, sweaty-palmed, her heart thumping, dialing his number, and then hearing him pick up. And he lets her talk, says a few words back, and I can see her face change and glow because she's thinking maybe this could really happen, everybody says what a nice guy he is, maybe he can see the real Liz, the Liz under the pounds and the lousy clothes, and I can see her face when he says he's going to get a bite to eat—still happy, maybe glad for the chance to catch her breath, because she's the one doing all the talking, you know she is, and then I can see her, holding a phone to her ear, waiting. Waiting. Waiting for a sixteen-year-old boy, who went out his back door with never a thought of her, the nice guy, and she's still holding on. Waiting. Every once in a while saying, “Mark? Mark?” And I want to leave this restaurant, and drive to Liz's house, because it is
her
house, and I want to wrap her in a bear hug and say, “Liz, put the phone down. Put the phone down, sweetheart. Don't you wait for a boy who is careless with your heart. You let him go. Find yourself a man who feels
honored
to have you on his arm. Don't you settle for less. Let him go, Liz.”

And I am more than twenty years too late to tell her those things, and if her no-show daddy was before me now, I would wring his neck and I'd do it for Liz, because he wasn't there to say the words that might have made all the difference in the whole wide world, and she never let go. And I know now, Liz is still waiting.

Our steaks and sides arrived and Mark busied himself over the food, which looked delicious, but I couldn't touch it. I had a sixteen-year-old girl sitting heavy on my heart and she was giving me heartburn. And Mark didn't look that golden anymore.

Mark said, “I'm telling you all this because . . . I don't know why I'm telling you.” He slid the two remaining olives into his mouth. Still chewing he said, “Yeah, I do.” He drank off the last of his martini but he shook his head when the waiter offered to bring him another. “I'm telling you because this is why Phoebe died. It's my fault. It's mainly my fault, but it's Liz's fault, too.

“Jenny and I got married right out of high school. She was pregnant, no surprise there, and my dad said I had to do the right thing. Whether he would have felt that way if I'd been playing college ball, I don't know, but my knee was busted and I wasn't and I married her. We lost that first baby, but Jenny stayed married to me, mainly, I think, because she didn't know what else to do with her life. She didn't want to move back with her dad, and her mom was living with a guy who had eyes for Jenny—that wasn't an option. Jenny lost two more pregnancies after that. I was ready to walk, and Jenny was, too, and she'd tell me so when she'd had too much to drink, and then we got pregnant with Phoebe.

“Do you remember, Bear? The first time you held your baby in your arms? I wanted to be there for that baby. I wanted to be the dad she needed. We both loved Phoebe. She's what kept us together for a long time.” Mark spooned some mushrooms onto my plate. “My parents helped us with the down payment on a trailer. What does your dad do?” he asked.

I told him my dad taught calculus at Houston Community College.

“So you never lived in a trailer?”

I said, “No.” My dad never made much money when I was a kid, but we did have a house.

“Where I'm from, the people I'm from, a trailer isn't anything to be ashamed of. A house was better, yeah, but when you're starting out, a trailer was a step up from an apartment. You ‘owned property.' Jenny was happy in the trailer for, ummmm, maybe fifteen minutes. She was a beautiful woman and she could have had any man she wanted. I know that because she told me so five times a day. She should have used that beauty and married a rich man, because beauty is a commodity and it has a sell-by date.” He shook his head. “I didn't know I was poor growing up. I thought I was middle class. Here in Sugar Land, I'd have been poor. No trailer parks in Sugar Land.”

“There is one.” I sawed off a bite of steak but I didn't put it in my mouth.

“A trailer park?”

“Off of 59. Near Grand Parkway. It's close to the paintball place.”

“Hunh!” Mark worked on a bite of steak. “What about at Clements High School? Do you think there was a whole crew of other trailer park kids there along with Phoebe?”

“Probably not. But when I met her, Phoebe wasn't a trailer park kid—Phoebe lived in the most expensive neighborhood in First Colony, and that was all the kids at Clements would know unless Phoebe told them differently.”

“And that would count with them, right?”

Was there a place in the world so pure that money didn't count? If there was, then it wasn't in Sugar Land, Texas.

My plate was still full but I stopped pretending to eat.

“So about a dozen years go by, and then, ahh, four and a half years ago, I'm working at a fourdrinier machine, that's . . . never mind what it is, it's a machine that makes paperboard. I've been at the job three, four months and it pays some better than the job before that, but not a lot. One day a salesman is walking clients through the work area, and who's with them? Liz Smith. Turns out Liz
owns
the damn company.” Mark gave a bark of laughter. “I didn't know. How would I know? I knew the company was owned by someone named L. L. Smythe; I'd known Liz as plain Liz Smith. I'd never have put two and two together. And when I saw her that day, I
didn't recognize
her. The nose is gone, for one thing. She's had her teeth fixed and she has lost a ton of weight. She's like, I don't know—all put together. She's a blonde now and—I never would have recognized her. But she recognized me, Bear, oh, yes. Liz recognized me. I'm working, not paying any attention to the management and clients walking through—what do they have to do with me? We're in different worlds. All I know is, some executive woman stops dead in front of me, staring like I'm the Second Coming and she knows for sure she's got a place in Heaven. She is lit up like a Christmas angel.” Mark gave a snort of laughter. “I look over my left shoulder, look over my right—it'd been a while since a woman had looked at me like that. Besides, there's something about having your name embroidered on the breast pocket of your coveralls that doesn't usually work for women in blazers.”

He put his fork down. He'd been playing with his food, too.

Mark said, “I know what this is going to make me sound like, but I'm going to tell you anyway. Yep. I was promoted
that day
. I'll tell you—those clients? They walked away thinking they'd seen the beginning of one of those old Meg Ryan movies. She tells my foreman she wants me in her office and those coveralls were
gone
. The very next day, Liz had me training to be a salesman. The deals are falling in my lap, since Liz was doing the real selling—it was my name on the contract, but she was doing the hard stuff. Not that anything is hard for Liz. And, ‘Oh, Mark, now that you're in sales, you need a new wardrobe'— she chooses everything. ‘It'll come out of my commissions,' she says.

“I'm having lunch with Liz three times a week so she can go over my ‘career objectives.' And then I'm having dinners with her. And then I'm in her bed.”

It's not a surprise. I'd been expecting this part of the story.

“I told Jenny about Liz. Not about the bed part. But the promotions and all and she knew how Liz felt about me in high school. Jenny's all, ‘Don't blow this chance, too—you better make good on this one.'”

Mark pressed the tines of his fork into his thumb. “It was just Jenny pimping me out. It felt good to be someone's ideal again. Liz made me feel like none of it was my fault—that it was Jenny who held me back.” Mark made a disgusted face. “I knew it was bull. Even then, I knew it was bull. But I was milking it. An expense account. Me! I got Phoebe new clothes—not from Walmart, either and she was, ahh, she felt pretty in them.

“Now, I'm not smart, but I'm not stupid, not anymore, and I'm being careful but Liz says I don't need to worry. Liz tells me she's on the Pill, and, anyway, we're both a sneeze away from forty.

“Only, turns out the pill she was on wasn't birth control, it was fertility treatments. Less than a week after she saw me, she started
trying
to have a baby.”

I was glad I hadn't eaten that steak. This story had started out Oprah and gone to Springer. Mark nodded at my expression. “Yep. Liz is goal-oriented. She even told me—this is after she was pregnant, she knew enough to realize these would not be words of seduction—she says that with her brains and my looks and athletic skills, our baby will be C-level across the board. Know what that means?
C
is for CEO. I was a sperm donor, Bear!”

A well-paid one, I thought.

The waiter did his discreet hovering act and Mark got him to pack up the rest of the meal and add it to the seafood box in the back.

“My life was out of control. I had a daughter who was going to need money for college and a wife living in a trailer park who thought someone owed her a house on River Oaks Boulevard. The extra money I'd started making was just enough to give Jenny an appetite for more. I'm sleeping with the woman who writes my paychecks, and that woman tells me,
a month and a half
into the affair, that she's having my babies. Two babies. Two. You get that?”

I got it. I didn't
want
it . . .

“Here's what Liz communicates, not as bluntly as I'm putting it, but she ain't mincing words, either: She wants to get married. She's always loved me, on and on.” Mark gives a tight smile. “If I decide not to marry her—keep in mind I'd never told the woman I loved her, because I didn't—if I decide not to marry her, she's sure I would understand that she wouldn't be able to work ‘alongside' me anymore. So I'd be out of work, although she
would
expect me to pay child support on the two babies.”

I think
Fatal Attraction
should be required viewing for all men between the ages of thirteen and eighty-five. You think you can eat the cake and the icing and someone else will pay the tab? Watch that movie.